It has been a week of give and take for the Birmingham Walkabout, possibly the
finest Aussie-themed pub to be found among the multiple strip bars of Broad
Street.

On the upside, David Warner has generated acres of free publicity by taking the pre-Ashes phoney war a little too literally. On the downside, Dan Evans has moved his training base to London, which will make a sizeable dent in sales.

Regular readers of these pages may recall that Evans, the Keith Moon of British tennis, is a connoisseur of Midlands nightlife. From his home in Hall Green, the Walkabout used to be the ideal staging post for nocturnal sallies into the centre of Birmingham.

Until recently, Evans sounded quite blasé about his lack of application. “I don’t train hard enough and don’t work hard enough,” he admitted in April, without a sliver of sarcasm. A couple of weeks later, he clarified that. “It’s not like I’m always nipping down the pub. But if I go out it’s often been for the night.”

It is hard to imagine any PR consultant recommending this sort of public self-immolation. Still, fair play to Evans; he seems to have shamed himself into a dramatic change of lifestyle.

Having spent the first half of 2013 swigging Gatorade rather than anything stronger, Evans was handed a wild card into the Aegon Championships at Queen’s Club last week. He capitalised by beating two top-100 players, including the hard-bitten world No 37 Jarkko Nieminen.

Admittedly, his run came to a juddering halt against Juan Martin del Potro on Thursday, but at least Del Potro is a former US Open champion, not a Slovakian journeyman of the kind he usually loses to. After that match, BBC commentator John Lloyd suggested that Evans had the shots – if not yet the physical resilience – to break into the world’s top 50.

“From January it was pretty apparent that I had to sort all that rubbish off the court out,” explained the ever-quotable Evans this week. “At the moment I’m training at the National Tennis Centre, where you have to be in bed by 10.30. There’s a security guard who comes and checks. It’s like the Big Brother house.”

If Evans’s about-turn feels encouraging, the same is true of his comments about the NTC. A plush £20 million centre in Roehampton, the very place embodies the rampant self-satisfaction of British tennis. And yet, there are hints of progress leaking out from behind its forbidding gates.

Five or six years ago, the juniors stationed at the NTC kept getting fined for posting pictures of revelry on social networking sites, or becoming involved in allegations of sexual misconduct.

Of late, though, this trickle of ill-tidings has dried up. For the new paradigm of youthful promise, look at the carrot-topped but cool-headed figure of Kyle Edmund. A 17-year-old from Beverley in Yorkshire, Edmund is doing everything he can to emulate Andy Murray’s Puritan work ethic.

You absorb a culture in the same way that you pick up an accent. It happens slowly and often subconsciously, through interaction with the people around you. The best way to change things up is to focus on the details, just as Rudy Giuliani – New York’s “zero tolerance” mayor – did by cleaning up broken car windows as the first step towards reducing violent crime.

That security guard at the NTC could turn out to be as influential as any performance director, if he helps establish the right patterns of behaviour among tomorrow’s graduates. Perhaps it is time for Mickey Arthur, the Australians’ beleaguered cricket coach, to appoint a “curfew consultant” of their own.